Flip Into Fall
by starcrosslane
Summary: Twenty autumn prompts, five hundred-ish words apiece, and one snuggly spider to tie them all together!
1. pumpkins (and other decorative gourds)

In general, Peter tended to be thrilled when he found something to break his fall when he tumbled off a roof without a web to catch him. He didn't run out of web fluid or jam his webshooters nearly as often as he did during his rookie days, but accidents still happened from time to time. And when they did, it was always nice when he found his way into a dumpster (when had his life come to _that_?) piled with soft bags to land on or bounced off an awning before he could faceplant on the concrete.

Fruit carts, however, were not ideal.

It was better than cracking his skull open on hard asphalt, he supposed as he shook a glop of pumpkin guts off his gloved hand...but not by much.

A bed of squashed pumpkins and pretty seasonal gourds squelched under Peter's back as he scrabbled frantically for a handhold that wasn't slippery with orange goo. It took a solid minute for him to haul himself out of the crater he'd dug into that poor fruit cart and resume the chase after the weird animal-themed-villain-of-the-week, but he was still taking that as a win. He'd like to see literally anyone else traverse something that treacherously slick with a better time.

Really, Peter decided as he swung back by to track down the cart's owner for an apology, it'd be hilarious to watch any of the others deal with that situation, period. The mental image of Tony scowling his way through the process of digging stubborn pumpkin guts out of the Iron Man suit's joints or of Captain America buried up to his elbows in orange goo the way Peter had been drew a cackle that echoed off the skyscrapers. It nearly made the sticky fruit residue that clung to his suit and the smell that pervaded even his state-of-the-art mask worth it. He shuddered a little with each new breath of pumpkin-tainted air, but at least he could take comfort in the humor of the situation.

A new thought struck him and he shuddered again for entirely different reasons.

"Karen," he said tentatively. "Would you please delete the last twenty minutes from the suit's archived footage?"

He could do that now. For the moment anyway, since he and Ned had done some tinkering last weekend and Mr. Stark hadn't gotten his paws back on said suit to change the archive permissions back yet. Peter had no doubt that he would eventually, given that his next internship day was tomorrow and Mr. Stark had some very strong opinions about which safety protocols were non-negotiable.

But for tonight, Peter was safe and in full control of his archive and breathtakingly relieved that Mr. Stark would never lay eyes on the image of him flailing around in a fruit cart full of smashed pumpkins.

...Relieved, at least, until the bystanders' Twitter photos began trending.

_**AN: So, I found this list of soft autumnal prompts and every ounce of sense fled my body. They're all going to be short, silly little ficlets that only exist as an excuse for me to revel in cozy fall things and procrastinate on the things I should actually be writing, but here we are! Enjoy!**_


	2. candles

There were candles everywhere. Short, squat jars and slender tapers and half-melted lumps left over from the last time the power had gone out crowded the coffee table, the bookshelves, the end tables—and Ned was still lighting more.

Peter chortled, although the laugh turned into a choke as he inhaled the unholy amalgam of scents wafting off the wax. Artificial fruity notes warred with cinnamon and cake batter and roses and cologne and those weird bathroom air freshener scents he couldn't quite pin down until Peter was fairly certain he was going to get smothered under the weight of May's entire candle collection burning at once. It _sucked_, if he was honest. Still, what could you do when your best friend went insane?

"Ned. _Ned_. The power's gonna come back on any minute. Seriously, man."

"And in the meantime, we won't have to sit in the dark," Ned said resolutely, still bustling around with a lighter in hand. He'd shot out of his seat on the couch like a rocket when a particularly vicious thunderstrike from the late autumn storm had knocked out the building's power, right along with the lights, the heat, and the horror movie they'd been watching from under their protective huddle of blankets.

Peter suspected the latter had the most to do with Ned's newfound obsession with obliterating every inch of darkness he could.

Every autumn, they went through the same routine. The ads for the scary movie marathons drew them in, a night of popcorn and thrills was planned, and by the time they hit the first jump scare, Ned rediscovered the fact that he couldn't deal with anything scarier than _Stranger Things_.

It was a shame, Peter decided. He wasn't usually much for horror, either—he'd done his fair share of hiding under behind the couch over their years of attempted marathons, too—but the rush of adrenaline that came with it could be fun from time to time. Tonight would have been the perfect night for it. Rain pattered against the windows, underscored by soft rolls of thunder that fairly dripped with spooky autumn aesthetic. Shadows danced on the walls, flickering in and out of the cozy golden light cast by a couple dozen tiny flames. Despite the chill starting to seep in, the apartment felt cozy and comfortable in all the ways that mattered for a night in with a good movie and a better friend. Peter let his head tip contentedly back against the cushions and grinned as Ned dropped back onto the couch, looking significantly less spooked now that the darkness was held at bay.

"Bright enough for you?"

"Yeah, finally." Ned said with an appraising look around the room. "It's kinda cool now, actually. Atmospheric." He paused, eyes lighting up with realization. "It's like having our own Hogwarts."

Peter's grin widened as he mentally compared their array of jars and columns to the floating candles in the movies and idly wondered if a little bit of webbing stuck to the ceiling would create the same effect with real life ones. The image of May's face if she ever caught wind of him hanging lit candles from the ceiling flashed before his eyes and he promptly discarded the idea with a shudder. Still, it was a fun thought.

"Hey," He elbowed Ned, scooting closer to share his blanket's warmth as the absence of the heater began to take its toll. His distaste for cold aside, Peter didn't mind for once. The chill was atmospheric, too, and there were few things Peter enjoyed more than magic in the air. "You wanna switch to Harry Potter when the power comes back on?"

"_Yes_."


	3. apples

"If you lost another tooth, would you just like...regrow it?"

Peter paused in eying the neat alternating rows of candied and caramelled apples in the store window to shoot Ned an affronted look. He'd yanked out a loose incisor with a caramel apple when they were nine, but he had no interest in repeating that little incident with any of his adult teeth, enhanced healing notwithstanding.

"_Dude._ That's sharks, not spiders."

"I was just asking! Pretty sure some species of spider can regrow lost limbs, so I just thought it might be a thing. You never know..."

"Pretty sure it isn't," Peter said, wrinkling his nose as he tried to imagine what that would even feel like. Ned snickered at his expression and forged ahead into the crowded entryway of their favorite sweet shop in the park.

It had been a tradition for ages now. Peter, Ned, Coney Island—every year since they were too short to ride any of the rides. As soon as fall settled in and the stream of summer tourists dried to a trickle, they picked a weekend and descended on Luna Park. Some years, it had been Ben trailing in their wake, grinning at their cotton candy-fueled chatter. Other times, it was Mrs. Leeds camping out on a central bench to keep a sharp eye on their comings and goings in a more practical manner than chasing a couple of ten-year-olds on foot. Now, they made the trek to eat their own weight in carnival food and nearly lose it on the roller coasters all on their own.

Most years, Peter didn't stop grinning from the instant they stepped through the gate until he staggered back into his apartment with a corndog hangover that night.

This year, on the other hand...it was a little harder to find that enthusiasm.

They'd ridden the Cyclone twice so far, and both times his mind had drifted back to when he'd slouched on top of it in a battered heap. It wasn't like the blinding panic that came with certain other memories from that night the previous year, but...different. Like the autumn sun slipping behind the clouds, casting faint shadows that Peter wasn't quite sure what to do with.

Ned, for once in his life, didn't comment. Peter knew he noticed—how could he not after so many years of observing Peter in all his moods? —but he kept right on treating it like every other visit to Coney Island. Apart, of course, from his determined efforts to steer Peter well away from the beach every time they brushed by it. Seeing as how it had been on fire last time he'd seen it, Peter couldn't help being grateful for that one. And being all the more determined that it was going to be exactly that. Just another visit. As much as he loved Spider-Man, it had lost him more than a few things. So many missed movie nights with May, skipped Lego builds with Ned, his Homecoming dance...his first date.

It was _not_ taking his favorite autumn tradition, too.

Ned yanked him from his thoughts, reappearing from the crowd clustered around the front register with a pair of apples in hand—shiny candy-red for him and gleaming caramel for Peter—and a grin on his face.

"Cheers!" He tapped the wrapped treats together before handing off Peter's as they ducked out of the cramped quarters and back onto the fairway. "If you do pull a tooth, let me know, because I want to video it growing back. For science."

Peter laughed as he sunk his teeth into the apple and screwed his eyes shut to focus on the flavor. With the familiar crunch of crisp fruit, the sticky sweet caramel on his tongue, and his shoulder bumping against Ned's as they strolled along...the shadows couldn't help being a little less dim.


	4. bonfires

"Pretty sure I've grasped the how of you and your little buddy trying to roast marshmallows over a Bunsen burner—still a little fuzzy on the _why_."

Peter snickered under Tony's bemused skepticism. Granted, the reasoning that led to today's detention wasn't the easiest thing to explain. But Peter supposed that if anyone could understand the motives for a chemistry class snafu, it was probably Tony.

"Well, I mean...mostly it was just boredom. It was a review day, so there was really nothing for either of us to do—"

"Sure, sure—studying's a bit beneath you two."

"_Hey_." Peter paused in stowing his backpack beneath his usual table in the compound's lab to shoot Tony an offended look. "Rude. And hypocritical."

"Just making an observation—onwards with your defense."

"Like I said, it was a review day and we were crazy bored, but there were these marshmallows left over from this other object lesson thing. And it _is_ bonfire season—Mrs. Brand spent like thirty minutes in AP English talking about the ones her family did on camping trips—but we can't do any real marshmallow-roasting in either of our apartments, so we...uh...improvised."

"Bonfire season, huh?" Tony tapped the wrench in his hand thoughtfully against his chin, an ornery spark lighting in his eyes. "Y'know, I think we can do better than a Bunsen burner..."

Peter's brow furrowed for a split second before the idea hit him, too. He snorted, unable to stop the grin splitting his face.

"But we can't, can we? Isn't that some kind of fire hazard? Plus, Happy'd throw a _fit_—"

"Ah ah ah—Happy's not the boss of me. C'mon—change of plans for today. We're moving this party to the lawn." Tony tossed his wrench aside and hooked an arm around Peter's shoulders to propel him out of the lab. "Honestly, what's the point of a hundred acres of country property if you can't occasionally set it on fire?"

Twenty minutes later, Peter was piling branches torn from the patch of woods that lined the northeast border of the compound into the framework of what would presumably be a tidy little bonfire once Tony was done tinkering with it. He suspected that Tony—being just as much of a city boy as Peter was—had no more experience coaxing life out of dry leaf tinder and a candle lighter than he did, but that didn't seem to be deterring him.

Something soft and squishy belted Peter across the back of the head. He whirled to find a bag of jumbo marshmallows at his feet and Happy stalking past with a fire extinguisher tucked under his arm. Peter grinned, firmly tamping down the urge to ask if Happy was taking over DUM-E's job permanently or just for the day.

"Stop smirking, kid," Happy grumbled in response to the flash of teeth Peter failed to hide. "I'm only out here to make sure neither of you set yourselves or the building on fire."

"Will you feel better about it if I roast you a marshmallow?"

Happy leveled him with a resigned glower and propped the fire extinguisher between his feet to free up his arms for folding into a more disgruntled pose.

"Don't burn it."

Tony snickered from where he'd settled onto the gravel to poke up the sputtering flame with a fondue fork appropriated from the kitchen right along with the marshmallows. "Knew you had a festive soul in there somewhere, Hap."

Peter tore open the marshmallows and skewered one on another borrowed ice pick to suspend it over the cheerful little blaze. It wasn't quite what he and Ned had been envisioning when that English class ramble sparked the idea in their minds. But with woodsmoke in the air, the flames chasing away the cold at his back, and Tony and Happy bickering in the background…Peter couldn't help thinking it was better.


	5. blankets

"May!" Peter let out a melodramatic gasp as he emerged from the bathroom, still toweling his post-patrol shower out of his hair. "How could you betray me like this?! I totally had dibs on the Ugly Blanket."

"You snooze, you lose, hon." May gave an unrepentant smile from under the chunky yellow knit of the coveted Ugly Blanket and patted the spot next to her on the couch. "Maybe if you were home on time, you would've beat me to it, hmm?"

"Yeah, yeah…" Peter vaulted the couch to squish into the space between May and the armrest, snuggling close for all the warmth he could steal. He'd cut his circuit around the neighborhood short—monthly Friday movie nights were sacred, especially after May discovered what he did with his after-school hours—but even just a couple hours swinging at high altitudes in mid-September twilight had left him chilled to the bone. "I couldn't exactly leave Mrs. Tully's cat in that tree, though. I would've been perfectly on time if it wasn't for Walter—promise!"

"Mmmhmm. You're just lucky I'm big on sharing." May shifted to give Peter a generous corner of the mustard monstrosity. According to the story Ben used to tell when he tucked it around Peter's shoulders when he stayed home with the flu or hid from thunderstorms under its heavy folds, it had been a wedding gift to Ben and May from an elderly family matriarch. Ugly as sin with its uneven patterns, oversized stitches and sickly shade of yellow, its status as a family gift had been the only reason it made it home from the reception.

It had stayed, however, because it was the softest thing in the universe. Whatever it was made of (wool, cashmere, some sort of magical unicorn hair—he and Ben traded ridiculous guesses for hours during those sick days) had a way of cradling all your problems away when you were wrapped up in it. Now, he and May staged friendly squabbles over it on a regular basis. Particularly on movie night.

"You turn to pick, Peter Pan." May nudged him with the remote, already craning forward to pluck the enormous bowl of popcorn from the coffee table. The whole apartment smelled of it, rich with butter and salt and comforting with the aroma Peter had long ago associated with home and May and the most relaxing night of the month. Granted, his sharper senses also told him it was nearly an hour old, but that was on him for sliding in later than he'd planned. Cold popcorn was still very edible popcorn. And since May made twice as much of it now that he had an unstoppable metabolism to consider, he planned to take full advantage of it.

"Princess Bride?" It was an old stand-by, but one that May didn't grow tired of as quickly as she did of some of his more nerd-oriented favorites. Not that she ever mentioned it, but Peter was more than observant enough to catch her eyes glazing over by the third act of _New Hope._

"As you wish," May answered with a grin and flourish from her non-remote hand.

Peter laughed as the movie fired up, using the momentary distraction to tug away a little more of the blanket. The sly, faintly amused look on May's face as she settled the popcorn in the blanket hollow between them told him she knew full-well he'd stolen a full half of it now. But it was just as clear that she didn't mind. After all, what was movie night for, if not sharing a blanket and the comfort that went with it?


	6. halloween candy

Mrs. Tully from four floors down had sat at the entry way of Peter's apartment building every Halloween since he came to live with Ben and May. She had cooed over his flappy-sleeved Jedi costume, his plastic Iron Man gauntlets, his buddy costumes with Ned—over the costumes of _every_ kid in the neighborhood as she perched on the stoop to dole out smiles and mini-Snickers.

And tonight, it had nearly gotten her killed.

Peter wasn't sure where the car came from. He had been perched atop the nearest light pole keeping an eye on the bustling crowds of giggly kids and bright costumes and fondly exasperated parents and chatting with the occasional tiny Spider-Person who passed by in homemade imitations of his own suit. It wasn't that he was distracted, per se, but...being on the streets in the middle of all the fun didn't lend itself to staying sharp. Particularly since it was fun in his own neighborhood, where he could spot familiar faces and yell his compliments to hand-me-down costumes he'd seen plenty of times over the years. It wasn't until the brakes squealed that he caught a glimpse of the SUV skidding through traffic like a battering ram, a line of cop cars in hot pursuit behind it as it spun out in a direct path toward Mrs. Tully's spot in the doorway.

Peter moved on instinct, flipping off the pole to hit asphalt a few yards beyond the hood of the encroaching car. The moment seemed to slow, as it always did in the milliseconds that proceeded anything his spider sense warned him of, but the car did not. Peter had an instant to brace himself, feet planted and muscles tensed for when he caught the front bumper with both hands.

Metal squealed as the hood gave way under his hands and bystanders screeched as they scattered from the sidewalk, but the SUV crashed to an abrupt halt. The collection of cop cars piled up behind it, spilling a tide of uniforms to collect the vehicle's passengers. Peter could glimpse ski masks through the tinted windows, but at the moment, he really couldn't be bothered with what they had or hadn't done. He pivoted to survey Mrs. Tully, who remained rooted to her chair a few feet behind him, perfectly unperturbed. He wondered briefly if she had even noticed the near-miss, but she lifed a delicate hand and beckoned him over.

"Hey, Mrs. ...Ma'am!" Peter swallowed the name he'd almost used-the name Spider-Man shouldn't know—but jogged over all the same. "Are you okay? Do you need me to call anyone? I mean, the police are already here, but if you need an ambulance or anything..."

Mrs. Tully smiled serenely from behind coke-bottle lenses and reached out to pat his gloved hand with one of her own, pressing a crumpled mini-Snickers into his palm with the other. Her eyes were as warm and kind as ever—as if he was just another of the crowd of kids in masks who would pass her tonight—but the knowing look behind them he wondered exactly how much she saw. In years past, she always had the uncanny ability to know every local kid's name (she'd babysat most of the building at one point or another, after all), no matter what they were dressed up as.

Peter held his breath for an instant, the candy in his hand squelching under his grip. But Mrs. Tully only kept smiling.

"What a lovely costume, dear."


	7. warm afternoon sunshine

There was something special about October sun. It washed the sky a bolder shade of blue, burnished the turning leaves and drying grass with golden light...and left Peter too relaxed and comfortable to even think of budging a single muscle.

He stretched out on Midtown's front steps, basking in both the patch of light and the heat radiating off the concrete at his back. Ned sat cross-legged at the bottom of the staircase, a textbook he hadn't actually looked at in ten minutes spread across his lap and a packet of fries left from lunch balanced against his knee. They'd gotten lucky with a free period in the space between lunch and their first afternoon class. And while that might have officially been intended for homework, neither of them was feeling up to it when there was a warm afternoon just begging to be lazed about in.

"Do you think they'd miss us if we just...didn't go back in?" Peter muttered as he slid his backpack behind his head and reclined on it like a pillow. Last night's patrol had been long and hard and every muscle in his torso still ached from his stint wrestling a stalled car off the Queensboro Bridge. Just lying there in the sun, letting the soothing heat seep into his bones sounded like pure heaven.

"MJ would skin you alive if you ditched practice again—that'd be twice this month, and I've only got so many options in my excuse repertoire."

"Ugh. Practice." Peter wrinkled his nose at the thought of it. He never minded the extra time with MJ, but the idea of sitting inside running drills while his brain wanted to do nothing more than nap in the sun was less than appealing. "Can't do it. I'm one with the stairs now."

"Don't you have an internship thing after school?" Ned chucked a fry in his direction, bouncing it neatly off Peter's nose with a lazy toss. "Pretty sure you'll _have_ to move eventually."

"Yeah...Happy's just gonna have to peel me off these steps when he gets here, though." Peter tipped his head to let the thrown fry slide into his mouth with the least effort possible. Ned giggled and went back to his textbook. A distant bell trilled from inside the building, closely followed by the shuffling of a few hundred feet as the halls filled with students moving from class to class.

"Hey, losers—you're gonna be late." MJ's voice echoed off the columns of the entryway, her silhouette framed in the doorway as she peered out around the few people filtering outside for their own free periods. The sunlight caught on her curls, glinting off the subtle threads of gold and red in a way that made Peter appreciate autumn sunshine all the more.

"Coming!" Peter scrambled to his feet, shouldering his backpack and scraping a hand through his concrete-flattened hair. Ned snickered, gathering his things at a much more leisurely pace.

"So... guess you're more one with MJ than you are one with the steps, huh?"

"Shut up."


	8. sweaters

There aren't enough sweaters in the whole of New York to keep Peter warm once the weather begins to turn. He has his own collection of toasty sweatshirts emblazoned with puns about atoms and chemistry and algebra and enough pullovers and layering cardigans to get him through the winter, of course. They live in the back of his closet all summer while he all but lives in t-shirts (and his suit). When the weather reaches that strange twilight between warm and cold when it's impossible to know exactly what sort of clothes are going to be right for the rapidly fluctuating weather, they seem to be all that stands between him and freezing his webs off.

The problem, however, is excavating them all once the weather begins to turn.

It isn't such a terrible chore, really. He groans over it a little on principle when May reminds him that the cold would be rolling in and that the sweaters had better roll in with it, but he can't really mind digging out all the old favorites and taking the excuse to remember where each of them came from. Particularly the ones he's…_borrowed_…over the years.

Because he does end up borrowing (or stealing, as Ned calls it, whilst insisting that he's a hoarder when it comes to anything warm and soft) on a pretty regular basis.

May's thick oversized pullovers aren't hard to snag on his way out the door when all of his buried in the laundry hamper or lost somewhere in the void of his closet, soft and warm and cozy with the scent of peachy shampoo. She always steals them back eventually, all smug smiles when she reclaims the worn-in old favorites that do the most yo-yoing between their closets, but she always leaves a freshly-washed replacement behind when she does.

Ned's are easy to borrow on the bus between home and a weekend AcaDec meet when the heater's too puny to reach the back rows and Peter's goosebumps aren't stemming from his spider-sense. Ned himself always runs warm despite the thick hoodie his mother always insists on stuffing in the back of his backpack (just in case). Thank heaven for Mrs. Leeds, Peter had mused as he curled into an ugly Midtown S&T zip-up that Ned shoves into his hands in a fit of concern at how his shivering jostled the seat.

Happy is a more difficult target. There's exactly one large hoodie emblazoned with a crossed pair of gloves and the name of some boxing gym in Hell's Kitchen from him, borrowed after a night's patrol where everything that could go wrong had. It had left a rain-soaked Peter shivering in the back of the Audi in a half-shredded suit until Happy had dug the hoodie out of the glovebox and passed it carefully over the partition with gruff orders to put it on before he froze. Happy doesn't ask for it back after he drives Peter home, and Peter certainly doesn't remind him.

Tony, however, doesn't even wait for Peter to pilfer anything warm and cozy. There are oil-stained Stark Industries hoodies tossed at him from across the lab whenever the temperature dips and heavy woolens spun from alpaca and Merino and a dozen other expensive things Peter tries not to think about when Tony wrestles them over his head at the first sign of a shiver. Peter _has_ tried to give those back, a process which only led to a minor heart attack when the first one shrunk after his attempt to launder it prior to returning it and a series of unimpressed looks from Tony as he fends off Peter's attempts.

"Keep 'em," he says, the faint lines between his eyes that Peter long ago recognized as worry lines easing in tandem with Peter's fading shivers. "They're a real improvement on those punny shirts of yours."

Peter can't argue the point. Sweaters—particularly the warm, roomy folds of the oversized ones—are the best. And they're even better when they're shared.


	9. stargazing on chilly nights

Peter clutched his blanket cape tighter around his shoulders with one hand and lifted his phone to the sky with the other, squinting thoughtfully at the screen. It wasn't easy coaxing a decent image out of a phone camera, but Peter was nothing if not persistent. He'd fiddled with the settings enough over the years to finetune the focus, the aperture, the lighting—all the things he knew made for photos that actually captured what he wanted to capture. At home in the city, that meant the things he loved: particularly vibrant sunsets, skyline shots from perspectives only he could reach, the occasional close-up of especially friendly pigeons, candids of May laughing through the smoke of her latest cooking mishap. Here at the compound…it was the stars.

He didn't know their names and couldn't trace the patterns of whatever constellations were wheeling overhead, but that didn't make them any less striking. With a velvet sky free of intrusive neons or glaring streetlights as a backdrop, the stars glowed like beacons, the tiny pinpricks of light he could see from Queens flaring into a horizon-wide lightshow here in the rural grounds of the Compound.

A soft chuckle from the sliding glass doors at his back pulled Peter away from his inspection, followed by the hiss of said doors opening to let Tony saunter out onto the patio.

"Your fashion decisions never disappoint, Underoos." The words turn to fog in the chilly air, breathed out with Tony's smile as he reaches over to adjust the blanket where the Iron Man pattern has bunched around Peter's neck. "Always a pinnacle of good taste."

"You're the one who's got your own merch lying around your house." A year ago, Peter might have been embarrassed to be caught parading around the compound with a plush throw draped around his shoulders. Now, with so many lab nights and shared missions and impromptu sleepovers—and so many other, more embarrassing moments—now water under the bridge, Peter was unrepentantly glad to be warm, regardless of whether or not he was wearing his mentor's merchandise in front of him.

"Touché." Tony eased himself down onto the lip of the patio next to Peter, knees popping with the movement. "Want to tell me why you're sitting outside in the cold?"

Peter hitched a shoulder in reply, but didn't look away from his stars. If he was honest, he would admit that he'd intentionally slid outside when he knew Tony was otherwise occupied with a late conference call and wouldn't try to keep him company. The stars, after all, weren't as enchanting to everyone as they were to Peter.

"Well, my homework's done… Thought I might as well take advantage of the view." He swallowed any reference to the stars themselves, but it wasn't a difficult leap in logic. What else was there to look at in the pitch black of a rural night?

"Huh. Hadn't really noticed much of a view." Tony spared a glance upward, his lips tipping down a notch in the half-second it lasted. The look vanished as quickly as it had come, buried again Tony's mask of calm as he knocked a knee against Peter's. But it remained long enough to remind Peter to tread carefully. "Didn't know you were into stargazing, bud."

"Oh, I'm not—" Peter waved his phone, the screen dimming as he flicked off the camera. "I just like looking at them. For photos and stuff. I haven't gotten any good ones yet, but like I said, the view's way better out here, so..."

"Pretty sure 'just looking at them' still qualifies as stargazing."

Peter rolled his eyes, grinning as he turned back to the horizon. There was no point arguing when Tony started bickering just for the fun of it. Normally, he would've bickered right back, but somehow the surroundings felt more suited to quiet than to chatter.

"You didn't have to come out here, you know," Peter murmured, scooching a few inches down the concrete to huddle closer to Tony's warmth. Tony snorted.

"'Course I didn't _have_ to." There was a pause as Tony slung an arm around Peter's blanket-covered shoulders. "But the company's better than the view."


	10. mist and fog

"You even think about going out in this, and I swear I'll show up to pluck you off the rooftops and fly you home _personally_."

"Um...hello to you, too, Mr. Stark." Peter was torn between snickering and being affronted when he picked up the phone. As if he didn't have enough sense to stay out of weather he wasn't prepared for without being nagged.

...To be fair, he usually didn't.

Enthusiasm (and conscience) tended to overtake common sense when it came patrolling. But still. It was the principle of the thing.

"I mean it, kid. We can't have you swinging face first into any storefronts. Aunt Hottie'll murder us both after we peel you off the glass."

Peter propped the phone against his ear and paced the length of the apartment's kitchen, eying the dense white fog that sprawled on the other side of the window. The weather hadn't been so bad when he headed home from school. A little wet and gray and soggy, but not horrible as far as September days went. By the time he'd traversed the subway, the remainder of the walk home, and the half a dozen AP History worksheets due by Monday, the clouds had dropped to street level and left the air a mess of cold, impenetrable mist.

Frankly, it was depressing. Particularly with May off at work for the night and the apartment as empty and blank as the fog outside. Just the sort of night he might otherwise have spent swinging just to stay busy if the weather hadn't been throwing a tantrum. And if May hadn't extracted a promise (complete with pinkie swear) that he wouldn't brave the streets despite the TV weather advisories she'd been frowning at prior to heading out herself.

"Did May put you up to calling?"

"'Course not. I've just gotten used to your little eccentricities enough to predict when you're about to do something reckless and ridiculous and—gimme another r word."

"Responsible?"

There was a snort on the other end of the line. "_No_. It's a good word, kid, but it's got nothing to do with your self-preservation skills."

"That's rude, Mr. Stark."

"Get your stuff together—Happy's on his way over to pick you up. We can log some lab time, get some work done on that parachute failsafe: it'll be good. Productive."

Peter rolled his eyes and muffled a skeptical huff in the sleeve of his sweater. Good and productive and _safe_, if he was reading the not-so-subtle fretting right. He had the feeling good and productive meant absolutely nothing in comparison to the "safe" part. And as annoying as that was to the fraction of himself that bristled at being coddled and watched over...he couldn't say he minded the care it stemmed from.

"I wasn't gonna go out, Mr. Stark. I promised May. She's at work and she was going to worry, so I couldn't just—"

"Good," Tony said, at least a hint of the previous tension ebbing out of his voice at that revelation. But he didn't retract the invitation. "So, if you aren't out swingin', you should definitely be free to come help me with the upkeep on the suit you keep putting through the wringer."

"You know, you don't have to—"

"Happy will be there in five," Tony steamrolled on, his voice still calm and amiable, but brooking no argument. Peter grinned. "Maybe ten, given the way people forget how to drive in this crap, but either way, get the suit and get downstairs."

"Okay, okay—see you soon, Mr. Stark." No sense fighting it now. It was a lost cause anyway if Happy was en route. That man never appreciated changes of plan.

"Bye, kid." Tony hung up fast, as he always did, but the warmth in his tone made up for the abruptness. As did the notion of Tony pestering him into an impromptu internship night just to keep him from being alone (or worse, outside) on a miserable night. Peter scrambled to stuff his things into the latest of his line of backpacks and hurried out into the night the instant Happy's arrival message pinged. The cold and damp nipped at his cheeks and seeped down his collar on the run to the idling car...but Peter couldn't bring himself to care.


	11. plaid flannel shirts

When he had arrived at the lake house a day earlier to kick off his fall break, Peter had been one shirt richer. Red and black flannel, thick and soft and ideal for layering over everything from t-shirts to PJs to shut out the cool September wind, and—ever since he'd tumbled out of bed two minutes earlier—missing in action.

"You," Peter said as he padded into the lake house's cozy living room in his pajamas, leveling one Morgan Stark with a squinty-eyed look. "—are stealing my schtick."

"Am not." The little thief piped up primly from her perch on the arm of the couch, all cheeky grin and sparkling eyes. "I stole your _shirt."_

Tony chortled from where he reclined with his tablet and a steaming mug of coffee, apparently completely content to watch from the sidelines while his children ran amok. Peter bit back a laugh, too; keeping even mock outrage in place was difficult in the face of a baby Stark wrapped up in a stolen plaid flannel shirt ten times too big for her.

"No, no, no—" Peter pounced to snag her in an easy, one-armed hold, dangling her upside down as he stepped over Tony's outstretched legs to drop into the seat next to him. "The whole stealing clothes from people bigger than you deal? Hate to break it to you, Morgie Mine, but that's _my_ thing." He poked her unprotected tummy, prompting a squeal shrill enough to ring all the way to Queens. Peter still grinned through the accompanying wince. "And also my shirt."

"It's karma, Pete," Tony said over the rim of his coffee cup, the corners of his eyes crinkling in a smile as Peter listed against his shoulder. "All those pilfered hoodies and sweaters coming back to haunt you."

Peter rolled his eyes, tickling the squirming bundle of giggly flannel in his arms as he pointedly ignored Tony's teasing. Sure, he might've stolen a closetful of Tony's clothes over years' worth of lab nights and post-patrol first aid visits. But that didn't necessarily mean he had to _acknowledge_ it.

"What do you want with my shirt, Momo? You have _tons_ of cool ones. And warm ones, for that matter, which is way more important actually. Seriously, is it always so _cold_ out here in the middle of—"

"Bein' Spider-Man!" Morgan's enthusiasm bubbled over before Peter's chatter could fizzle out. "I needed a suit. And I can't find the _real_ one."

"Yet," Morgan added with an appraising glance over his current clothes that made Peter suspect she'd have no qualms about picking his pockets just as efficiently as she'd burgled his room if she thought he was hiding the official suit on his person.

"Thank all things holy for that," Tony muttered under his breath, no doubt imagining the havoc a tiny child with a webshooter would wreak just as vividly as Peter was.

"Ohhh." Peter nodded sagely, not as surprised as he once might have been. Playing superhero was always a favorite for Morgan. She rotated between Iron Man, Rescue, War Machine, and Spider-Man depending on the day. And apparently, depending on whose clothes she could snatch. "And you subbed in a flannel because…?"

"'Cause it's yours and it's red and black." Morgan shoved the overlong sleeves up her arms, wriggling her shoulders in an attempt to make the red and black flannel sit a little less than like a tent. She flung her arms out in an imitation of Peter's signature thwip-thwip motion and grinned. "See? Perfect."

"Perfect," Peter echoed, quiet under the continued babble of spidey-noises and contented in the calm of the cabin. How could it be anything else here?


	12. crunchy leaves

When Peter arrived at the lake house for the weekend, he had had his doubts that there actually was a house buried somewhere under the mounds of fallen leaves the surrounding forest had dumped on it. The cabin and its surrounding yard were piled high with them, some raked up into haphazard heaps that hinted there had been some effort to clean up for Peter's twice-monthly visit and others creeping up the side of the garage, the barn, and every other solid surface in untamed drifts of wild color.

Since then, he, Tony, and Morgan had spent nearly the whole of Saturday morning manhandling the worst of the debris into a single mountain. Peter hadn't minded. A lazy morning spent puttering around the yard in the warmth of the autumn sun, breathing crisp lake air and laughing at Morgan's attempts to wheedle a turn with the leaf blower out of Tony. It had been good. Relaxing, even, after the madness that was returning to school after the reversal of an apocalyptic event. A quiet and peaceful start to the break Peter desperately needed.

The afternoon, however, promised to be anything but quiet.

"You ready, Momo?" Peter adjusted the strap of Morgan's bicycle helmet (a custom job, if the red and gold color scheme was anything to go by), giving it a gentle knock with his knuckles to draw out a giggle.

"Come onnn, Pete!" Morgan bounced in place, eyes sparkling with barely contained mischief. Getting her to stand still long enough to wrestle her into said helmet had been a trick, but Peter refused to take any risks when in that department. "Let's go!"

"Okay, okay—hold on to your butts!" Peter grinned as he scooped her up, tucking her under his arm like a football amid a flurry of preemptive giggles.

"One..." He crouched like a runner in the starting blocks, Morgan clutching at his shirt with the movement. "Two..."

On "three," he sprang, sprinting across the yard with a wild yell to dive bomb the leaf pile. A mid-air twist sent them skidding through the heap on Peter's back, plowing up leaves until the world around them spun with a blur of sunset oranges and red and cozy autumn browns.

Morgan squealed, giddy laughter rising over the rasp and crunch of the leaves, and Peter cackled, breathless as they rolled to a stop at the foot of the oak that had supplied all their fun. It had been Morgan's idea. Morgan's _insistence_, actually, once Peter let slip that he'd never gone leaf-jumping even once throughout his Queens-born-and-raised life. And now, lying spread-eagled in a bed of dry grass and crumpled leaves, breathing in the woodsy spice of crushed foliage and listening to Morgan's contagious giggles, he couldn't help being glad he'd let her talk him into it.

A shadow fell across them, tall and imposing and suspiciously Tony-shaped.

"What," Tony demanded, his arms folded and his lips twitching with barely contained amusement. "—are you heathens doing? I'm only asking because I know you would never dream of _intentionally destroying_ the very leaves we spent three hours raking, so clearly I must be missing something here..."

"Clearly," Peter snickered back as Morgan rolled out of his arms to scamper up into Tony's, chattering brightly about leaf-jumping all the way. Tony lost the fight of holding back his grin and held out a hand to haul Peter up as well. "You're just missing our creative vision for this leaf pile."

Tony tsked, ruffling a hand through Peter's curls to clear the leaf confetti still clinging there and his smile turning a smidge fonder when Peter leaned into the touch.

"You two have no regard for lawn maintenance."


	13. cool evening walks

"You know, your hands are really cold." MJ's breath fogged in front of her face as she turned to look down at their intertwined fingers. Peter grimaced. It wasn't a new complaint across the board—he'd made Ned yelp plenty of times with a strategic finger to the back of the neck and gotten more than a few sputters out of May when their hands brushed while sharing a blanket during movie night. The whole dating thing, on the other hand, was new, and so were the finer points of hand-holding etiquette. Maybe he'd have to invest in handwarmers. Or gloves that didn't come attached to a super suit.

"Oh!" Peter moved to untangle his hand from hers. "Sorry, I just—"

"Don't." MJ narrowed her eyes at him as she reached to sandwich his hand between both of her warm ones, her brows scrunching the same way they did when he turned up at school with a limp or a poorly hidden black eye. "Is that a spider thing?"

"Yeah." Peter grinned as MJ folded her hands more securely around his, the jittery spark of happiness that still came with—well…with _anything_ MJ-related, really—settling into a ball of warmth behind his ribs. He couldn't elaborate on why winter was no longer his friend here, out in the open of the quaint little street they'd been ambling down for the past forty-five minutes, but MJ nodded as if that was enough.

It was an old street in midtown that they'd ended up on for their fourth date thus far, lined with crumbly brick buildings and amiably scruffy little shops and diners and taverns. This time of year, the stoops and entryways were littered with jack-o-lanterns and posters advertising ghost walks among the historic—and supposedly haunted—alleys and byways.

According to MJ, those were for tourists.

Since they were _not_ tourists, they were conducting their own ghost walk, strolling hand-in-hand under the glow of the street lights while MJ pointed out the sites of hauntings she'd found particularly interesting in her prior reading about the area. The longer they stayed out, the closer they pressed, eventually walking shoulder-to-shoulder to ward off the chilly air seeping through their coats.

Peter sighed as they ended a long, circuitous loop through the highlights of the neighborhood, which had included the exterior of a pub they weren't old enough to enter, a fire escape rusted into place above a dark alley, a tiny brick bookstore which had been nice for the browsing, if not for the haunting, and not one single spook. As per usual, Peter had the feeling Ned would shake his head when he demanded a run-down of events later, muttering a fond comment about how adorably weird they were. Peter glanced down at where MJ's hands stayed curled comfortably around his and decided Ned just had poor taste in date activities.

"Guess it just wasn't a good night for ghosts," Peter said as they drifted towards the nearest subway entrance. MJ cocked her head at him, her lips turning up in that brief, bright smile he was so fond of.

"Who cares about ghosts?"


	14. quiet cool dark early mornings

Peter pulled his jacket closer and scrunched his shoulders down to let his nose burrow into the warmth of his collar. It was only a few blocks from the apartment to the subway station from which he took his train to school, but by the time October settled into New York, it made for a chilly walk. With the sun barely starting to rise in the east by the time he slipped outside, precious little light filtered through the cracks between buildings, leaving Peter's streets and alleys awash in cool shadows.

Usually, he didn't mind them. Easing into the stark light of day gradually rather than all at once came in handy on days when his senses were touchy, and a little extra time in the dark during his commute could mean the difference between a dull headache and a splitting migraine.

Today, on the other hand, with every muscle from his toes to his nose still sore from the half hour he'd spent clawing a teetering school bus back up from where it dangled off the side of the Queens Bridge the afternoon before, the dark and the cold just made him want to scurry back to bed. Bed, where it was warm and soft and there wasn't a single school bus (or school bus accident) in sight.

But, with three quizzes and an Acadec drill session on the docket, Peter had no choice but to keep on slogging. He hunched his shoulders against the bite in the wind and kept walking right up until a flash of color in his peripheral vision pulled him up short.

Peter gaped, freezing in place for a solid thirty seconds. Half the side of the little bodega he passed every morning and evening had been painted over, graffitied with a mural twice as tall as Peter and at least three times as bright. The colors shone like a beacon, the design coming across almost neon against the lingering pre-dawn haze. A stylized school bus filled with happy little faces smiling from the windows and a heroically-posed Spider-Man perched on the roof, saluting the neighborhood with a jaunty wave. A bold "Thank You, Spiderman!" arched over the top of the picture like a banner in bright red and blue letters.

Peter scrambled to fish his phone out of his pocket. He couldn't tell if it was simply a particularly vibrant shade of yellow that made the mural practically glow through the camera's lens as he snapped a shot to send to May and Mr. Stark and Happy (the entirety of the "(mostly)responsible adults" group message on his phone) or whether that was just a side-effect of the excitement bubbling up in his chest.

This wasn't why he did what he did. Nine times out of ten, he was already swinging away before there was a chance for gushy thank yous. Outside of the occasional churro from a grateful grandmother or hug around the knees from an enthusiastic toddler, he rarely got much follow-up from the people he helped. No closure on whether they were okay once he swung out of sight. A slow smile bloomed across his face. This was...this was nice.

"Whoa..." There was a breathy whisper from up the sidewalk. Ned ambled up from where Peter's street forked into his, his mouth hanging in a perfect o and his grip on the straps of his backpack going slack. "_Dude_..."

"Right?!"

"That's like the second-coolest street mural I've ever seen!"

Peter swiveled to squint at him. "Second-coolest?"

"Well, yeah...they forgot the hyphen. But it's still cool. _Way_ cooler than the Captain America one on Twenty-Fourth," Ned said, his smile so pleased and matter-of-fact that Peter couldn't help grinning back as they turned to fall into step en route to the train station. Even with the shadows still hanging over them and the cool wind tousling Peter's hair...the morning felt bright.


	15. soup

By this point in his life, Peter knew more about Happy Hogan than he had ever planned to. He knew Happy wound down every evening with an episode of Downton Abbey (mostly because so many of Peter's patrol reports had interrupted that routine), he knew Happy called his ma every third Sunday night (because he'd been threatened within an inch of his life if he ever dared interrupt _that_ for anything less than a blood-and-guts emergency), and he had cackled until he fell off Tony's couch at a picture (gleefully shown off by Tony himself) of the mullet Happy had sported back in '99.

But, most importantly, he knew that Happy—loathe as he was to admit to anyone that he had actual hobbies outside of grumbling and glowering—made the best chicken soup in the known universe. Peter had only had it once, delivered in a boring stainless-steel thermos and with a brusque "get better" when he was two days into a weeklong struggle with what Tony later dubbed "spider-flu," but that one time had been enough to convince him.

Convincing Happy that said soup was an absolute necessity for recovering from an icy late-autumn patrol, however, was not so easy.

"C'mon, Happy—pleeeeease?" Peter wheedled around the chattering of his teeth as he dripped a distinctly unhealthy combination of rainwater and blood on the penthouse's couch. Admittedly, it hadn't been the best night for swinging. With a wet, drizzly fog rolling in off the river and the damp air hanging thick enough to seep through even the most insulated of super-suits, even Peter knew it would've been smarter to stay in. But a habit was a habit. And patrolling was much more than a habit these days. "It's freezing, and _I'm_ freezing, and with all that rain outside, it's totally soup weather!"

"And whose fault is it," Happy said slowly, too absorbed in applying the last of a set of butterfly bandages to the gash over Peter's brow to put too much effort into banter. "—that you're freezing, huh? You just _had_ to go out tonight…"

"Well, I had to at least check in on things! Can't have the neighborhood thinking that Spider-Man's slacking," Peter retorted, voice muffled as Happy tipped his chin this way and that in a final once-over for any cuts or scrapes he might've missed. To be fair, he _had_ planned on just a quick once or twice around his usual patrol radius. The patch of ice glazing over what had looked like a perfectly secure foothold, however, had thrown a wrench in that plan. Along with a concussion.

"Well, maybe if Spider-Man slacked more, the rest of us wouldn't have to spend so much time keeping tabs on him."

Peter rolled his eyes. The grumbling would've been much more impressive if Happy hadn't volunteered for the tab-keeping. With May working nights for the remainder of the week and Tony off to London for a meeting he couldn't wriggle out of, it was clear that the babysitting baton had been passed off to Happy for the weekend. He doubted the man would've been "housesitting" at the New York penthouse for any reason other than being conveniently nearby in case Peter needed an emergency pick-up or a bit of patching up if a patrol went pear-shaped.

"Does 'keeping tabs' on me include soup?"

"You keep pestering me about it, and it'll include nothin' but dry toast." Happy stepped back with a pointed glare and closed his first-aid kit with a decisive snap. He flapped a hand in the direction of the penthouse's living quarters. "Go find some clothes that aren't gonna drip half the Hudson on the carpet."

Peter snickered, but hauled himself to his feet to shiver his way to a hot shower anyway. By the time he emerged, toweling warm water from his hair rather than cold and wrapped in sweats from his guest room, the air in the penthouse had changed. It would've been subtle to less keen senses, but to Peter, the threads of savory steam wafting from the kitchen were impossible to miss. Simmering chicken stock, flecked with hints of pepper flake and garlic and a half-dozen other tantalizing spices Peter couldn't pin down. Peter sucked in a deep breath and grinned as he ambled into said kitchen, listening to the rhythmic chop and crunch of the vegetables Happy stood at the cutting board to dice.

Dry toast, indeed…


	16. pumpkin spice anythingeverything

"You're a lifesaver," May croaked through a long inhale of the steam curling off the top of the top of her latte. She hadn't moved in the thirty minutes since Peter had dashed out and around the corner to the nearest coffee shop, remaining propped up in the corner of the couch under a cocoon of knit blankets and discarded tissues. Her cheeks were still flushed a sickly fever pink, Peter noted with a frown, and her eyes still half-lidded with exhaustion, but pressing that coffee into her hands had at least brought a little twinkle back into them. "And I do mean that outside of when you're bouncing around the neighborhood in your leotard, too."

"I don't _bounce_," Peter grumbled, smiling in spite of the teasing as he perched on the edge of the coffee table and took stock of the current supply situation. A mostly-full box of Kleenex balanced on the arm of the couch, an open sack of cough drops tucked into a crack between the cushions, and a bottle of cold medication within easy reach for the next dose—it was enough for tonight, he decided, though he'd probably make a run to Delmar's for chicken soup in the morning. Or very possibly for another pumpkin spice latte, if that continued to be the only thing that sounded good to May's infected taste buds.

He was fairly sure she'd been half-joking when, after half an hour of Peter's hovering and handwringing and asking what he could do, she'd said that a pumpkin spice anything would probably heal her on the spot. Personally, Peter doubted that anything that consisted primarily of sugar and pie spice had any real medicinal properties, he knew a good comfort drink went a long way when you were hacking up a lung every other minute. And besides, May never asked for _anything_. If coffee would make her feel better now, when she miserable and desperately trying to be subtle about it, then he was going to make damn sure she got it.

May let out another sneeze that threatened to rattle the windows, and Peter dutifully passed over the Kleenex. "Can I do anything else? Do you need any more blankets? Or another pillow? Or—"

"No, no, no—you've done more than enough already, sweetheart," May unwrapped one hand from cradling the warmth of her coffee cup to give Peter's hand a squeeze, flashing a dimmer version of her usual blinding smile. "You've spoiled me enough as it is."

"Pfft. Did not. This is just standard sick-person care, as outlined in the May Parker Nursing Handbook." The remark earned him a hoarse snort and a cough drop chucked in his direction. Peter grinned and tossed it back, the knot of unease in his stomach that had roiled in his stomach all day finally loosening a smidge at the normalcy of it.

It wasn't often that May—the unquestioned expert on looking after everyone else—got sick herself. She had always been the one sitting up with him while he sniffled his way through elementary school viruses or rubbing his back on the bathroom floor while he gagged through bouts of stomach flu. Last night, however, she'd been sent home halfway through a twelve-hour shift and promptly collapsed on the couch in a haze of snotty, feverish misery that left Peter scrambling to figure out the whole "nursing" thing.

It made him nervous.

Maybe even _unreasonably_ nervous, if he was honest, for something as silly as one of the garden-variety colds that made the rounds every autumn. But with the way Parker luck usually ran, he found he couldn't help it. Still, seeing May finally flash a smile that didn't seem forced or pained did help. Perhaps there was more to the miraculous powers of pumpkin spice—aside from making the apartment smell less like Vicks and Dayquil—than he'd thought.

"Pretty sure this still counts as spoiling," May retorted, tapping her cup with an index finger as she lifted it for another sip.

"It doesn't," Peter insisted as he stood, bending to give May a peck on the cheek before he moved to settle into the lumpy armchair diagonal to the couch with the homework he'd left there earlier in the morning. There were plenty of other things he'd planned on doing today—a meet-up with Ned, one of the long, thorough patrols he only had time for on the weekends, a supply run to the rotation of shops where he bought web fluid components—but this was lightyears more important. He'd stay with May. Just like she'd always stayed with him. "But even if it _did_, I'd only be returning the favor."


	17. windy wet gray autumn days

Peter knows he's forgetting something. There's at least one more assignment dangling just out of reach among the dozen or so papers and study guides and lab reports due in the weeks leading up to exam season, but somehow, he finds it difficult to care too much from his spot nestled in the corner of his couch. Rain mixed with sleet patters against the window in faint, uneven gusts, the tiny bits of ice tinging softly off the fire escape so melodically it nearly lulls Peter to sleep again on the spot.

With the skies spitting cold muck all day, braving the streets for patrol had been off the table (by both order and threat of May and Mr. Stark), so MJ's suggestion of a Saturday spent making headway on their combined mountain of coursework had seemed reasonable. And it was, for the first few hours. Peter's rather proud of the progress they made, right up until they started passing the reading assignment for AP English back and forth to be read aloud and the catnaps promptly began. It was unavoidable in weather like this, Peter decides, as his eyes begin to droop again no matter how much he fights it. The hush that falls over the world when autumn clouds roll in just isn't worth fighting.

The warm weight pressing into his shoulder doesn't help matters, either. Peter tips his head just enough for a better view of MJ's face where it burrows against his side as she dozes and smiles, too drowsy to form any truly coherent thoughts about the warm spark she always lights in his chest, but unreasonably pleased nonetheless. It's a different sort of warmth, he thinks, than the firework thrill of a kiss in the summer sun or the jittery blaze of excitement from a date ventured in the vibrant spring air. With the muted gray light of a muted gray day casting the living room in quiet, sleepy shadows, the warmth settles into something just as quiet, but…cozy. Steady. The sort of warmth he can idly imagine keeping them close long past lazy fall homework dates. Five years down the road—or ten or fifteen, he isn't picky—he can envision them sleeping away a soggy afternoon in exactly the same way then as they do now.

May passes by in the hallway, the flicker of movement before she pauses to grin at the tableau in front of her just enough to draw Peter's attention. Her eyes twinkle, but her smile goes soft, falling somewhere between proud and wistful as she catches Peter's eye over the top of MJ's head. Both hands come up in a thumbs up. Peter rolls his eyes and ducks his head behind the cover of MJ's curls. If he was more alert, he'd probably be blushing like a maniac, so he can't help being grateful for the quiet, hazy peace that comes with a nasty autumn afternoon. Evidently, it was good for more than just marathon study-sessions-turned-nap-breaks.

Peter lets out a sigh and lets his head tilt sideways to rest against MJ's, his eyes drifting shut once more with the movement. The wind still nips at the window. The rain still taps against the glass. And Peter still feels warm, inside and out. He was sure there were more productive ways to while away an autumn afternoon...but he couldn't think of a single, solitary one that would make him any happier.


	18. hot seasonal beverages

Peter supposed that there were worse places to spend an autumn weekend.

He couldn't _think_ of any as he heaved a careful sigh into the medbay-issue pillow that props him up at the best angle to stay off his battered ribs—six of them, to be precise—but presumably there had to be. Jail, maybe. Or a stint at a real hospital, where the pain meds aren't as hefty as the ones Tony's people cooked up for him.

The compound's medical wing isn't necessarily an unpleasant place, but Peter had never exactly been thrilled with it, either. The glare of white, medical-grade lights left him cold all the way through and the sharp scents of half a dozen disinfectants layered one over the over always sent him spiraling into a headache. It isn't too noticeable when his visit is no more than a quick in-and-out for a few stitches or a once-over after a bad patrol, but where he sat now, at seventeen hours and counting into a two-day "observation" for a tumble off a skyscraper, it's all begun to wear on him. Particularly since—for once—he had had _plans_.

The fall carnival passed through once a year, on the same weekend with the same corndog vendors, the same half-rusted rides, even the same hot cider carts all crowded on the same patch of grass at the mouth of the park nearest Peter's apartment. The stalls and booths popped up overnight like mushrooms on Friday, ready for Peter explore the next morning. When he was small, he'd looked down on the web of colorful awnings and blinking game stall lights from Ben's broad shoulders, giggling at the silly faces May made at him from below, her lips dusted in funnel-cake powder and her smile bright enough to compete with the October sun. But the routine had changed over the years, shifting and squeezing to make room for the ways in which Peter's life had done the same.

Some years, he and May walked the same paths they'd walked with Ben, spending pocketfuls of quarters on cheap fairway games and nibbling on greasy goodies. Sometimes, when May was railroaded into weekend work and Peter was alone, he went on his own, just long enough for a paper cup of hot cider heavy with cinnamon and a memory or two. The memories weren't as bad there, with the air tasting of fried sugar and the warmth of the cider rolling down his throat, and being out amongst the crowd—with all its happy chatter and muffled laughter—felt better than holing up in the apartment.

Today, however, Peter was alone, and there wasn't even any cider for a consolation prize. With May pulling a weekend shift and Tony pulled away for the remainder of the afternoon for a conference call, the compound felt cavernously empty and achingly dull in comparison to the color and noise and life that always came with the fall carnival. The fall carnival that he was _missing_. He shot a glance out the tree line rolling into the distance on the other side of his window and wondered idly how long it would take to swing to the city and back if he was using treetops rather than rooftops. And how thoroughly the adults in his life would murder him if he tried it…

"If you're thinking what I think you're thinking, _stop_ _it._" A warning from the far end of the room jolted Peter from his thoughts, stern and familiar and just about as friendly as that particular voice got. Peter grinned.

"Happy!" Peter's voice almost echoed in the stillness of medbay, but he couldn't bring himself to care about the noise as Happy lurched through the door under the weight of an armful of bags and packages. He hadn't been expecting any visits, least of all from Happy, who—much like Tony—always had a few zillion SI tasks on the backburner. "Totally wasn't thinking anything."

"Uh-huh." Happy slanted an unconvinced glance Peter's direction as he unloaded his cargo—what appeared to be most of Peter's textbooks, the phone he'd lost somewhere in the wilds of Happy's backseat on the emergency drive to the compound the night before, and a mountain of snack foods that Peter suspected were not medical staff-approved—on the cramped little bedside table. He scanned the tangle of IV lines and monitors and wrinkled his nose in the unimpressed manner of a man who wasn't entirely sure what he was looking at, but didn't like it anyway. "You been behaving yourself?"

"_Yes_." Peter paused in gaping at Happy's delivery long enough to shoot him an affronted look. "Despite being bored out of my skull. Happy, you didn't have to bring—"

"I had a feeling you might be kinda edgy. Here," Happy creaked into the plastic chair adjoining the bed and passed a short, squat thermos into Peter's hands. "Brought you something."

"Is it coffee?" Peter arched a brow as he cradled the thermos with both hands, soaking in the warmth that bled through the metal. "Happy, are you goin' soft? Because I distinctly remember you saying that the only time I'd get coffee on your watch would be over your dead—"

"Just open it, Parker."

Peter snickered, much more interested in making the most of a little company than he was in whatever Happy had brought him, but turned his attention to the bottle in his hands anyway. He stopped unscrewing it halfway through the second turn, freezing as the familiar scent washed over him. Sweet apples cooked down with cloves and cinnamon, tempered with honey and hint of orange for zest—once upon a time, his senses wouldn't have been acute enough to pick out the components, but now one sniff was an explosion of color and spice. More than enough to block out the harsh sterility of the medbay. Peter hastily wrestled the top the rest of the way off to pull in a deep breath, his eyes falling shut with the satisfaction of it for half a second before he turned on Happy.

"_Happy…_How on earth did you know about my cider?!"

Happy gave a stiff shrug as he settled into his chair, his face carefully schooled into a nonchalance that didn't quite ring true. "Your aunt mentioned it. She thought you might be a little antsy about missing your little festival—"

"_Carnival._"

"—whatever—and suggested bringing you something to keep you occupied. Which I did _only_ to keep you from getting any ideas about staging a jailbreak, so _please_ do me a favor and don't," Happy finished with a stern finger a few inches from Peter's nose. Peter snorted into his cider and eyed the mound of goodies to his right. He could spot a lot more carnival food than just cider from his vantage point—foil-wrapped packages that looked suspiciously like corn dogs peeked from the top of one of the bags—and if May had suggested buying half the carnival to keep him occupied, he'd eat his IV pole. No, that move smacked of someone else entirely…

"Uh-huh…so you _are_ going soft."

There was a sputter, followed by a heavy sigh as Happy gave up trying to glare him into recanting and shook his head.

"Just drink your cider, kid."


	19. the first truly cold day of fall

Peter perched on a sliver of concrete ledge strategically scouted out for its proximity to the pair of billboards that kept the piercing fall wind from freezing him on the spot. October had given way to November, and the temperature had dropped like a rock the minute the calendar page turned. Crisp fifty-degree days had already started to plunge into thirty and even twenty-degree nights, heavy with frost and icy winds off the river, but today had been the first truly cold day thus far. The temperature hadn't budged an inch over thirty since daybreak, leaving the city in a chilly haze more reminiscent of winter than fall and leaving Peter half-frozen. And thoroughly bummed.

He cupped his hands around the Styrofoam cup of coffee the vendor down the street had given him and shivered. Fall was great. Awesome, really, since it was one of the few meteorological sweet spots for a guy whose thermoregulation wasn't quite up to par; Peter wasn't even close to being ready to give it up. Or anything else, for that matter.

"I can think of a solid fifteen—no, sixteen! —cozier little hideaways for teenage vigilantes within a four-block radius of here right off the top of my head, one of them being your very own apartment, Mr. Parker." Peter had heard the encroaching whine of repulsors long before Tony got close enough to make pointed remarks, but that didn't make him any more enthused when the distant whine turned into the crunch of metal boots in rooftop grit. "Want to explain why you're not in any of them?"

"Would you believe me if I said the view's better?"

"Maybe, if you were actually looking at it instead of huddling in a windbreak. Seriously, what are you trying to do, freeze your—_lordy,_ that's cold." Tony grimaced at the blast of cold air as his faceplate lifted, drawing a snicker from Peter.

"Yeah, laugh it up, Underoos—'least I'm not the one sitting out here in the Arctic for kicks." He clanked gingerly onto the ledge next to Peter, the residual warmth from his thrusters radiating off his suit like a mobile heater. Peter scooted a few inches closer to take advantage of it, his shoulder knocking against Tony's as they both settled against the concrete. He hadn't necessarily been thrilled with the idea of company tonight, given where the discussion would likely go. But the extra warmth was nice. "What's up with that, huh? Thought we had an agreement about your low-temperature escapade after last year's...fun."

"You get a little touch of hypothermia _one time_, and you never live it down..." Peter rolled his eyes. There _had_ been an agreement about limited patrol time once the weather turned. But that was a winter thing. A looming eventuality that had seemed miles away during the endless nights of summer and still pleasantly distant during the golden fall afternoons. He was doing his best to ignore the way it was creeping up on him already.

"No, you do not." Tony stifled a shudder that didn't seem to stem from cold, as if dipping into the memory of Peter's unfortunate night with a broken suit heater and an overlong patrol all over again, and reached out to anchor a hand on Peter's shoulder. "And you don't get to question-dodge, either. Gimme something here, kid."

"Technically, it's not winter yet..."

"Oh, no?"

"Nope. Not until December 22, per Google." He had checked, carefully scoping out the loopholes for dragging out his fall patrol schedule as long as he could. In some distant part of his mind, it felt silly, a little childish, even, to push so hard against what seemed like common sense. But the more he thought about another long winter settling in, the less he cared about being a little childish and the more he cared about not giving up a second on the rooftops.

"Hmph. Take that argument up with the thermometer." Tony muttered, wrinkling his nose at the way his breath fogged with every word, before he turned sharply back to Peter. "Your heater working okay so far? No hiccups?"

"Yeah, it's good…toasty." For the most part, anyway. The heater was efficient—even more so after the obsessive upgrades that came with the previous year's upheaval—but even it struggled to keep a cloth suit warm for long. Still, Peter fully intended to push it as far as he could. "That why you came all the way out here to check on me?"

"Ah, ah, ah—I asked first."

"It's just…winter sucks." Peter took a pull of his lukewarm coffee and drummed his heels idly against the gutter beneath his feet. Winter hadn't always been such a sore spot, but the last one had been…harder than he'd expected. He never realized how much of his time he filled with hours upon hours spent swinging over Queens until the biting wind and spitting snow meant he couldn't do it anymore. He didn't realize how much of a…distraction…it was until it was taken away. Before Ben had…well…before Ben, the shift in seasons hadn't mattered much. Peter almost always had someone around, no matter what time of year it was.

Now, however, with the family whittled down to two…things were different. May's work hours were no longer during the cold months than they were during the warmer ones, but the hours in which Peter was home to notice skyrocketed. Even with Ned only a few streets away, that was still too far to slog very often when the deeper snows hit, and without May, Ned, or a neighborhood full of other people to keep him busy, winter dragged on like one long, black night. A lonely night.

"It's too quiet."

"You _would_ take issue with a little peace and quiet." There was a chuckle in Tony's voice despite the analytical gleam in his eyes as he seemed to turn Peter's answer over in his mind. Peter pinned him with an exasperated glare and hoped the mask's lenses were squinty enough to get his point across.

"Okay, okay, rude—I get it." Tony held up his hands in surrender, the flippant tone giving way to something gentler. More understanding, as realization took hold. "Too much quiet is…not always a great time, I know. But even if you aren't going to be out prowling the streets as much—no, don't give me that look, we've discussed this—you're not gonna have to go solo all winter, Pete. In or out of the spandex. The penthouse's always open for you. So's the lab, the compound, Happy's car—any time you want company, you've got options."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," Tony said firmly, the arm he'd hooked around Peter's shoulder tightening for half a second in the awkward attempt at an embrace that the armor's restrictive joints allowed for. "This is no seasonal internship, kid. You're stuck with me, rain, shine, or snow. Or alien invasion—y'know, whatever happens to be falling from the sky on any given day, it's irrelevant: you aren't in it alone."


	20. snuggling to keep warm

A layer of frost crept up the window that bordered the couch Peter had camped out on for the evening, delicate little patterns forming and branching as the cold seeps into the glass. Peter shuddered and buried his face in the heavy throw May had bundled him up in from nose to toe an hour earlier. Just looking at the ice left him feeling colder...but that wasn't saying much, given that he'd been trembling like a leaf since well before the school nurse had hustled him out to May's car that afternoon with orders not to come back until the fever burning through his system had run its course. No matter how high May cranked the car's sputtery old heater to fend off the first tendrils of November chill on the drive up to the compound—her first choice for any of Peter's medical care these days—or how tightly Peter burrowed into his jacket, he couldn't get warm.

It was just a virulent strain of the flu, according to the skeleton crew available in the compound's medical bay on an otherwise quiet weeknight. Enough to knock a regular person on their back for a week or so (Peter knew firsthand, given how many of his classmates had been marked absent when the first cases of the fall flu season began to roll in), but nothing his immune system wouldn't kick with a few days of rest. It just wouldn't be a _fun_ couple of days. Peter rolled away from the window and heaved a wet sigh. He really did have all the luck…

He drifted in and out, occasionally cracking an eyelid to shoot scornful glances at the encroaching frost. It felt as if it had leaked through the windows to run over his toes and crawl up his torso, seeping into his veins by osmosis. May popped in occasionally, a warm hand caressing his cheek or pressing a straw to his lips to coax him into a little water now and then, and Happy—who had met them at the door when they arrived to help May wrestle Peter's dead weight down the three halls to the medbay—appeared from time to time to deliver tissues and cough drops and cautious pats on the shoulder. He listened to them bustle around in the background, soft footsteps and quiet whispers lulling him into a doze like a lullaby right up until a third voice chimed in. Some distant part of Peter's mind that wasn't foggy with fever or heavy with congestion perked up at the voice. Tony's, going back and forth in the soft conspiratorial tones he always saved for co-parenting strategy sessions with May, as he wound his way through the compound's halls towards Peter's spot in the living space.

"You alive in there, Underoos?" A careful hand finally rustled the upper layer of Peter's blanket cocoon, sifting until it landed on Peter's shoulder and tugged, gentle even as Tony tried to excavate him from his cave. "Looks like you're treading awful close to suffocation by designer couch."

"Ugh," Peter said into the upholstery he'd buried his face in, too aggravated with the cold air beyond his blanket haven to leave his face exposed. "M'not dead. Jus' cold."

The cushions dipped beneath him as Tony settled in the sliver of space between Peter's head and the end of the couch, finally prompting Peter to raise his head enough for a peek. Tony's lips twitched in a faint smile when he emerged, all hazy eyes and sleep-spiked curls, but the smile didn't quite outweigh the tinge of worry in his eyes. It never did when other responsibilities made him show up late to a "Petermergency," as Peter had been scandalized to learn that Tony and May had dubbed any of his failed escapades. Still, late or not, he always showed these days. That alone was enough for Peter.

"Nice of you to rejoin the world of the living." Tony reached out to card a hand through Peter's hair, smoothing it carefully out of his eyes as he sat grudgingly up. He didn't particularly _want_ to, but it felt rude to not even make an effort for a moderately polite greeting. Even if the movement did make the room around him spin like a crazed carnival ride. "How're you holding up, bud?"

"Ugh," Peter reiterated. "Can't get warm." He shot a reproachful glance in the direction of the kitchen, where he suspected both Happy and May had disappeared. "And nobody'll gimme any more blankets."

"People tend not to do that when your temp is pushing a hundred and two."

"Hmmph." Peter scrabbled for a more articulate response about how rude withholding blankets from a clearly _dying_ teenager was, but with his brain too overheated for deep thought, all he came up with was an offended grumble as he flopped over to collapse against Tony's ribs.

Tony didn't flinch at the sudden onslaught of bony teenager plowing into his side. It was too routine to be surprising by now. He just sighed as he wrestled one arm free of Peter's weight to curl it around his shoulders and reel him in close, the sound seeming to aim for exasperated, but coming out somewhere in the contented range.

"So, since you can't have any more blankets, you're just going full-on penguin huddle, huh?"

"Y're better than a blanket anyway," Peter retorted as he shifted to fit more snugly under Tony's chin. It wasn't the first time he'd ended up cradled there for comfort—that had been over a year ago, after his first gunshot wound had sent him to the medbay for four days—or for warmth—Tony had insisted on carrying him into the compound _himself_ after the hypothermia incident, more than a little afraid to let Peter out of his sight while he was such an unhealthy shade of blue—and he suspected it wouldn't be the last.

"'Better than a blanket.'" Tony snorted as he kicked his shoes off to prop his feet on the coffee table in the scant space left between piles of discarded tissues and half-drunk glasses of water. Settling in for the long haul as Peter relaxed into the warmth. "I'll be sure to put that on my business card next printing."

Peter opened his mouth to fire back the question of why the heck _Tony Stark_ needed a business card anyway, but only managed a drowsy hum. Finally, he was _warm._ Cozy and safe from the frost pricking at the windowsill. And from everything else short of his scratchy throat and throbbing head, for that matter. Dimly, he caught the rise and fall of Tony's voice as he went on murmuring about everything and nothing and whatever fell in between in a clear bid to lull Peter back to sleep, but he couldn't bring himself to complain. On a frigid autumn night, he had nothing better to do than drift off in the warmest—and safest—place in the world.

_**AN: IT'S THE LAST ONE! Thank you all so, so very much for sticking with me through all twenty fall ficlets! They've been so fun to write (even if they've slowly been growing much larger than the intended 500-word limit I had planned on), and your feedback has been so kind and so helpful! You're all wonderful human beings, and I thank you for reading!**_


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